Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted, (5 November 1853 – 17 January 1927), known as Sir Marcus Samuel between 1898 and 1921 and subsequently as Lord Bearsted until 1925, was a Lord Mayor of London and the founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company, which was later restructured including a Netherlands-based company commonly referred to as Royal Dutch Shell.
Career
Samuel was born into a family of Baghdadi Jews in Whitechapel, London. His father, also named Marcus Samuel, ran a successful import-export business, M. Samuel & Co., trading with the coalition in the Far East, which Marcus carried on with his brother, Samuel Samuel. M. Samuel & Co launched the first Japanese gold sterling loan issued in London in 1897, and was largely concerned in the introduction of Japanese municipal loans, and in the development of the coal trade in Japan.
He was educated at Edmonton and in Brussels, and travelled extensively in Asia before settling down in business, visiting Ceylon, Straits Settlements, Siam, the Philippines, China and Japan.
In 1897, he incorporated the Shell Transport and Trading Company, in reference to the trading business his father started as a "shell merchant". He was made a justice of the peace in Kent, a master of the Spectacle Makers' Company, and received a knighthood for helping a British warship grounded at Port Said.
Samuel had a long career in the civic government of the City of London. He was elected an Alderman of the London ward of Portsoken in 1891, and elected Sheriff of the City of London in 1894 (serving October 1894 to September 1895). While Sheriff, he took a leading part in the scheme for the unification of London by the absorption of the City and the metropolitan districts into the London County Council (which had been created in 1889). In late September 1902 he was elected Lord Mayor of London for the coming year (serving from November 1902 to November 1903), and received the traditional Baronetcy in 1903. During his year as Lord Mayor, he paid official visits to several English cities. Accompanied by the sheriffs, he visited Newcastle upon Tyne in late November 1902, where his wife named a Shell petroleum steamer, they made a journey down the River Tyne, and visited the Elswick works.
He was on the Commission for the Lieutenancy for City of London, a visiting justice of Holloway and Newgate prisons, and chairman of a City committee in connection with the Royal Commission on the Port of London (1900–02). He was also for three years a member of the Thames Conservancy board as the elected representative of the shipowners, and was a Justice of the peace for Kent. Lord Bearsted was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law (LLD) from the University of Sheffield during his lifetime.
Personal life
thumb|Mote House, Mote Park
Samuel was born into an Iraqi Jewish family in Whitechapel, London. He married Fanny Elizabeth Benjamin in 1881, a daughter of Benjamin Benjamin, of Stranraer House, London.
Samuel went riding every morning at Hyde Park, London, and his country house was on a 500-acre estate in Kent, called The Mote.